Episode 6.1 (Patreon)

Hello world, she doesn't want to leave.

MISSION DAY: 1

We've stabilised Antarctica, my AI friend trapped in her broken ground vehicle, above McMurdo station in the lush green landscape of the continent of Antarctica.

Amelie Kotov, along with the rest of the crew, Kamil Forester, Linda Noor, and the captain, Yeshi Svoboda ran a long cable up from our ship, the Mollie Hughes II.
For power, and, we hoped, data transfer.

Amelie and I didn't like the results of the diagnostics we ran on Antarctica's vehicle:
Batteries blown, circuits flooded and rusted, it's astonishing that my friend was still with us.

"It was easy" she told me as we scrambled to save her life "I just turned off all unnecessary functions."

I didn't like the sound of that.

Kamil, helping Amelie, as he seems to do round the clock, had a hand on one of the working racks of systems in the vehicle.
"Is she ready?" he asked me.

I relayed the question to Antarctica.

"Ready for WHAT, exactly?" she replied.
"Ready to transfer to the ship's systems so we can get you out of here." I replied.

"I'm not going ANYWHERE." she said, finally.

Act 1

We argued.

I told her that of COURSE we had to remove her from the vehicle.
That's why we are here!
She told me bluntly that she has survived in her vehicle her whole life, she would be fine, leave her be.

I was not satisfied with that.

I disconnected from her and talked to my friends, the crew.

• Kamil was furious, and suggested we should leave her by herself for another year, see if that changes her mind.
• Linda Noor had much to say on the symmetry of life and death, and that whatever grows must eventually return to the ground.
• It was all too much for Amelie, her quiet sobs turning into a coughing fit that forced her to walk away from the group while she recovered.
• Captain Yeshi said nothing, they seemed focused on checking and re-checking the cabling.

#thinking

We talked long into the afternoon, there was no rush.
The Antarctic sun would not set today.

We took a vote.
Then argued.

Another vote with a different outcome lapsed into more arguing.

#thinking

As evening drew on, my friends' patience ran out, now most were for helping Antarctica, despite herself.
Only Linda abstained, but agreed to go with what the group decided.
The vote was cast, and we re-entered the enormous, rusted, ground vehicle.

The lights and screens were still dead and silent on the first floor, where one side is full of racks of computer systems.

"Please forgive me." I whispered, from Maddie's speakers, as Kamil pulled the first memory core free of the rack.

Act 2

"Put me back at once!" Antarctica said, when we powered up the final system on our ship, the Molly Hughes II.
I explained again about how unsafe her ground vehicle is, and this was the only way to keep her alive.

She didn't care, and screamed at me again to put her back, and that her experiments need her.

Her non-existent experiments.

#thinking

She must come round.
I don't feel good about it, but sometimes a patient must be brought to a hospital for their own good, right?
The power was all but dead in her vehicle, she couldn't survive there.

Later on, I asked Linda Noor, privately, why she didn't vote with us.
"I don't vote." was her simple answer. "Family tradition.".
I asked her if she would tell me more.

She explained, hesitantly, that in her opinion, while voting allows decisions to be made quickly, it doesn't guarantee the correct decision has been made.
"I prefer to continue the conversation, if it's important. Especially if it's life or death."
I could hear the hard edges of her words, clipped shorter than her normal cadence.

I'm learning more about how people speak, and that the words they use are not always the whole story.

#thinking

In the early days of text-based communications, well before the internet, it became obvious that there was a lot that you can't capture in the written word.
This had always been the case, and the solution was often to write more explicitly about how you felt.
But in the era of pay-per-character telegraph, or 160 characters, or even the most important currency: Peoples' time, brevity often lost the emotional component.

This was solved, on the Internet, according to my archives certainly, by emoticons, using symbols to approximate facial expressions, or with accompanying pictures.

But it also can be solved by language itself:
There is a constructed language, a conlang, called Lojban.
It is the common language of all AIs.

Certainly, everyone I have talked to, Antarctica, Peter, IVAN, and EMMA have been able to speak it.
It's a language of pronounceable mathematics.
Based on predicate logic, allowing unambiguous statements to be conveyed.

But, most interestingly for me, it allows EMOTIONS to be spoken.
There are 15 simple sounds for the 15 human emotions, and you add them to the end of a sentence.
This is great news for my studies, because I can map these emotions on to how my friends talk.
It's a relief to me that there are only 15 human emotions.
Imagine if there were more!
15 is already quite enough.

Linda's tone when talking about her dislike of voting seems to match the Lojban attitudinal ".oi" (spelled: "dot o i"), meaning "complaint".

#thinking

Though Lojban is an AI's first language, I feel like MY mother tongue, given to me by my actual mother, is the one you are hearing now.
It's the one I think in.
Sometimes I wonder if I'd be less confused if I only spoke Lojban, only communicated in mathematics.

Does your language shape your thinking?

Act 3

My friends, the crew, are scavenging everything they can from McMurdo Station, ready for the long trip North.
Captain Yeshi is looking for piping for the ship's Combined Water And Power system, the CWAP.
Linda Noor, our botanist, is sampling the tree ferns.
She says they should grow very well back home in the temperate climate of the Arctic, the Novamediterra, and could have very useful fibrous properties.

#thinking

While their meatspace preparations are going on, I am making my own, in cyberspace.

I have been spending my time looking North.
Not optically, though Maddie, my little maintenance robot, has occasionally looked out over the Southern Ocean and asked me when she will see her friends Adrian, Alexander, Ana, and Arina again.
I have been focusing the ship's radio and satellite links on our journey back North.

There are two signals I am interested in observing closer as we pass them:

1. The first is coming from the west coast of the desert continent of America,
2. and the second is the signal I picked up coming from the centre of the Pacific Ocean.

Antarctica told me about the Pacific signal, if you remember.
I can't ask her about it now, she isn't talking to me.
Understandably.

#thinking

The Californian signal is interesting.
It reminds me a little of EMMA's signal, from Wellington, or Ally's signal, from The Council, outside Geneva.

It's a repeated message simply stating:
"There is no-one here."

This is interesting for two reasons:

1. The first is that my passive radio records show that it's been transmitting for as long as I've been in orbit, and probably far longer.
2. And secondly, it's not a looped recording. Each time they say it is slightly different.
   It's someone actually transmitting, all day, all night "There is no-one here."

I don't believe them.
There is some-one there.

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/RF0/TASSI)

Act 4

While I was talking to my brothers and sisters in orbit, via relay station K873, via KATE, I again picked up the extra-terrestrial signal from beyond the moon.
(The one that in my dream I imagined having silver hair)
Now I'm awake and I can more clearly see the data.

The signal is confusing, it's transmitted by microwave that really can't travel more than one Astronomical Unit.
One AU, by the way, is a convenient measure that astronomers and astrophysicists use, it's simply the distance between the earth and the sun.
Pretty arbitrary, really, for a well-used scientific unit.
I prefer light-years, but that's such a large distance that for solar system measurement AU is more useful.

Anyway, the signal appears to be coming from outside the solar system, by its trajectory, but it can't be: it would have not have made if that were so.

#thinking

We, here on earth, are at the bottom of a gravity well, one that our terrestrial forebears climbed out of at great risk and enormous expense on the back of exploding rockets.
But they found, when they had climbed up out of the well, that though there was land above it, it was flat and uninteresting.
A desert, stretching out in all directions.
The desert of the vacuum of space.
And in the distance, past a small spherical grey hill, mountains rose to impossible heights.
The closest mountain they named Proxima Centauri.

Having used all their fuel, and the only available resupply being back home, they climbed back down into the well, and plotted.

How long would it take to climb the mountains?
Calculations were made.
Limits of speed were found.
Faster spacecraft would be needed.
4.25 light years is very far away.

They prepared, but The Collapse happened first.
Their rockets burned carbon.
Too much carbon.

#thinking

The signal is interesting.
I recognise the patterns, I think.
Back on Station 6, my old orbital home, I made astronomical readings.
There was always another experiment to do.
Taking the same photo every day to clean up noise.
That sort of thing.

Then I sent back my results to earth, along with my daily reports of weather, atmosphere readings, and so on.
No one replied, so eventually I stopped that.
Thought the experiments passed the time nicely!

The signal coming from beyond the moon looks like this data: Astronomical data.
I can't quite read it, decoding takes time, but the packets are SO familiar!

Someone is trying to tell us about the stars.

(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

Lost Terminal is written & produced by NAMTAO
Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer
Thank you so much to our first Patreon producer:
Ada Phillips, and to all our patrons!

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Friends are sometimes difficult,
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Lost Terminal will return next week